MOONGLOW BAY
Bunnyhug’s debut pulls you in hook, line and sinker
The waters of Moonglow Bay teem with life: a fortune’s worth, in fact, for any competent fisherman. But the people here do not fish. Suspicion, grief and the good oldfashioned ravages of time are working together to smother this quaint Canadian hamlet. But it’s never too late to get better – not as long as one person still cares.
When hunting for the core of their fishing game, Bunnyhug founders Lu Nascimento and Zach Soares found it by stripping back. The most successful prototype was the simplest: a brisk back-and-forth loop of fishing on the sea and cooking on the shore. “People sat down and played this thing for like 15 minutes. They were super-happy doing just that,” Soares says. “And I was like: cool! Anything we add to this is just extra flavour.”
From Stardew Valley to Spiritfarer, fishing has become a staple feature of ‘cosy’ games in the past few years, albeit one that can feel like a fiddly afterthought. Moonglow Bay is angling towards something richer, a fine-tuned experience, intense but intuitive, with escalating difficulty and a range of rods and lures that allow for different playstyles. Over on the shore it’s a bit more Cooking Mama, all chop-chop minigames and gold stars for good performance, with a bulk-cooking option to keep things from getting repetitive.
With a strong formula locked in, Soares and Nascimento started to think about incentives. Aside from sheer pleasure, what could they use to draw players back to the sea? One thing they were keen to avoid was the focus on personal gain that blights many life simulators. “We wanted to make the game a little bit less capitalistic,” Nascimento says. Your overarching goal in Moonglow Bay is not to become a millionaire, but to reinvigorate the soul and economy of the town. Selling a lot of dishes feels good, but real progress comes when you can sit two people down and get them to hash out their problems over a bowl of fish pie.
Drama beneath the waves parallels the turmoil on shore. As you earn the trust and gratitude of the townspeople, they’ll help you gain access to new parts of the sea. Delicious and valuable hauls await, but so do other things – creatures altogether more difficult to deep fry. You need to confront these mythical monsters in order to beat the game. They aren’t bosses in the traditional sense, but compounded trauma and thorny psychological issues given thrashing, gnashing, physical form.
It’s an intriguing tightrope for a game to walk: half sweet, half melancholy. Many sliceof-life
games offer the fantasy of upending your life and starting afresh somewhere new. For your middle-aged fisherman’s wife, change doesn’t come by choice, but through unexpected grief – age and heartbreak forcing her to revaluate everything. “My father’s best friend lost his partner when he was 50,” Soares says. “And this was a partner he’d had since high school, so he was like… what now? He told me he wanted to re-explore his friendships and stuff. That holds so much worth to me. It’s not about jumping to the next person, it’s about strengthening what you have around you.”
Such as your children, for instance. The protagonist’s grown-up daughter drives her into action at the start, and remains a helpful presence throughout, tagging in via an optional couch co-op feature. In the cooking sections, for example, she helps out at a separate station, creating an experience Bunnyhug describes as “Overcooked but relaxing.” Out on the water, she has her own boat to bump around in, or she can take the helm while you fish. And as the new town planner it’s she who most wants to see Moonglow Bay restored to its former glory.
The town itself is a tribute to its makers’ intertwining interests, a voxelated wonder with a diverse population and an intriguing mythological history. It’s also a tribute to the rugged beauty of Canada’s east coast, particularly Nova Scotia, where handsome candy-coloured houses bunch together above the turbulent waters of the North Atlantic.
“So many games are made in Canada, but so few are set there,” Nascimento says. Indeed, Moonglow Bay revels in the overlooked: small towns, small businesses, mothers, people of colour, people in mourning. It’s a celebration of little victories – and how, when you combine enough of them, they become a triumph.
Your overarching goal is not to become a millionaire, but to reinvigorate the town